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i don't think i would know what to think about the anthropic ipo (which seems to be quite promising financially, based on the folks i follow on here who read s-1s for a living) if i hadn't read 'blood in the machine,' @bcmerchant.bsky.social's excellent book on the luddites.

but i did, and one of the lessons i took from it was that productivity gains from technology can be real (in the way that they appear to be with claude code, for example) and also degenerative and exploitative at the same time. many such cases!

idk man. it would have been nice if these companies all just collapsed under the weight of their own ambition and i guess some of them still might but so long as anthropic remains profitable it is doing so on the back of labor it did not pay for and i think that’s bad.

the most interesting question for me with ai was never “does this shit work” (though in many cases it seems not to lol) or “can it make money” (though in many cases it seems not to lol) but “why is it allowed to just rip off all our work and then sell it back to us”

the answer is pretty clarifying for thinking about the political power of transformative technology, i think. there are vast fortunes to be made stealing from the workers of the world, and political systems are rarely equipped to stop it even if individual politicians want to (which they rarely do)

Ah, yes, bots, famous for "making sense"

i can do this all day